Today is Friday, March 4, 2022. As the war rages on in Ukraine, things appear to be looking more grim for this European country. Russian forces have laid siege to the city of Mariupol in Ukraine’s southeast, which can be a dismal harbinger of things to come for other Ukrainian cities, as Russian forces carry out siege tactics and mass shelling to take over major metropolitan areas. This new development is covered in an online article for The Boston Globe by Paul Sonne and Ellen Nakashima entitled “Russia’s siege of Mariupol a grim sign for other major Ukrainian cities.”

Mariupol is a heavily fortified city comprising 430,000 residents and its capture could be an augur of grim things to come in the ongoing conflict. There seems to be no end in sight for this bloody rampage in Europe’s second largest country.

In assessing what options could be adopted to check Russian President Vladimir Putin’s increasingly desperate and devastating invasion of Ukraine, an article in my online edition of AlterNet appears, written by Brandon Gage, entitled “There may be only one way to defeat Vladimir Putin once and for all,” lays out the various options that could be relied upon to combat the push by Putin’s military forces.

As of now, military support and sanctions have been the two major tactics employed by the United States along with its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union allies to force Putin to withdraw from the country. In the publication Vox, an extensive report was printed yesterday that included interviews with foreign policy experts who assessed how likely certain strategies are to curtail the violence in Ukraine. In a statement detailing the measures now being taken to punish Russia for its brutality toward Ukraine, Vox wrote, “The basic Western strategy has been to make the war more painful for Putin: Supply the Ukrainians with weapons while imposing crippling sanctions on the Russian economy. These measures are designed to shift Putin’s cost-benefit analysis, making the war costly enough that he’ll look for some kind of exit. In broad strokes, experts say, it’s a sound strategy – one that can still be escalated, albeit within certain bounds.”

What could conceivably happen if this war is protracted over an extended time is that more Russian soldiers die and the Russian economy gets ever so weak – potentially galvanizing antiwar sentiment among the Russian elite and population, possibly inspiring the Russian people to depose Putin. The West’s strategy is to cause enough military casualties and economic pain which would force Putin to be deposed by his own people. The seeds of change in Russia have already been sown as protests protesting Putin’s pointless pursuit have erupted in cities throughout the empire. It is in this light that regime change could be the ultimate blueprint for peace in Ukraine and a brighter future for the good people of Russia.

In more revelatory comments on the former president delivered by former National Security Adviser John Bolton, today he exposed how Putin was expecting Dumpf to withdraw from NATO if he had ever won a second term. Bolton admitted that Dumpf had no interest in Ukraine other than trying to “find Hillary Clinton’s computer server.”

The former adviser to Dumpf made these remarks during a virtual event with The Washington Post on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where Bolton mostly offered critiques of current President Joe Biden’s foreign policy in the region. Here Bolton offered his assessment that Dumpf would have withdrawn from NATO had he won a second term. NATO was always viewed as a liability by the dim bulb occupying the White House who believed that European countries were not paying enough of their fair share of providing defense to the alliance.

This comment from the mustachioed foreign adviser to the last president is so typical of the Orange Menace’s lack of intelligence or insight, when Bolton said that Dumpf “barely knew where Ukraine was,” which pushed back on the baseless notion that Dumpf had been “tough on Russia.” What was closer to the truth was that Dumpf was tough on his orange dye for his hair than anything else.

As you recall, Dumpf was impeached for the first time over his withholding of $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in order to pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to launch an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter over allegations of corruption. Bolton was not the only one who was concerned by Dumpf’s behavior during his one term in office. He admits that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper were both unsettled by their boss’s actions. Bolton concludes, “All of us felt that we needed to bolster Ukraine’s security and were appalled at what Trump was doing.”

With this event with John Bolton, all I can ask is this: How much evidence is yet needed to indict Dumpf as a puppet of Putin doing his bidding all the time while he was in office? I wonder if anyone has thought of now demanding that those transcripts of Dumpf’s then-conversations with his pal, Putin, should be revealed for the world to see, given the new developments in the former president’s relationship with the brutal dictator of Russia. Can these transcripts actually be produced now? I really wonder.

We are in a very fraught time right now. Putin has put the entire planet in peril with his atrocities in Ukraine. What comes next?

Have a good weekend, despite the tenor of the times.

Stay safe and be well.